AKICOLJ/DW

[desperance]

Horse-people! Tell me a thing:

Back in the days when people rode horses as a matter of course, as a means of transport, if you had ridden five or ten miles to pay a call and were perhaps not expecting to stay very long, say half an hour or so; if you rode to the stables of the house and there was no one there to take charge of your horse, what is the minimum that a reasonable person would do for that horse in terms of unharnessing/watering/that sort of thing before they would feel free to go into the house? Would they feel obliged to take the saddle off entirely, or might they just loosen the girths? Would a bucket of water be good or bad? Etc etc. I know nothing...

Comments

[flick]

Not so sure about The Olden Days, but with modern notions of what's cruel / kind I'd say, if it were just for half an hour, all one would do would be to loosen the girth and make sure there was water. I suspect that that wouldn't have changed in reasonable recent history.

Now, you'd probably run the stirrups up, too, but the further back you go the less likely that would be to work with the design of the saddle. (second picture)

You might take the saddle off if it was hot and the horse had been sweating.

What you wouldn't do (you haven't mentioned this, but just in case) would be to give the horse food if it had just worked very hard. Unless you wanted to generate a plot point by having the horse get colic.

For reference: if I've ridden a horse, and I know it's going out again in <1 hour, I'd probably stick it back in its stable (so water and some hay available (but I've already let it cool down towards the end of the ride)) and just loosen the girth. If it was longer than that, I'd untack it.

Gosh. I feel *useful*!

[desperance]

You are not only useful, you are fabulous: because what you tell me is exactly what I wanted to hear (loosening the girth and supplying water are exactly what he's done, because they seemed kinda, y'know, sensible...). Thank you!

[flick]

[bows]

Glad to be of service!

I forgot to mention: you'd also want to either tie the reins up to something or loop them (usually either by undoing the strap that goes around the throat --the throat lash-- and then re-fastening it with the reins inside, or by just putting an extra twist in and putting them over the head a second time), so there's no danger of the horse getting tangled in them.